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Congestion Pricing - Idea To Reduce Queue Times AND Increase Overall Player Happiness

GundayMonday·6/14/2016, 5:29:15 PM·3 votes·1,016 views

Saw a parallel to another problem after watching the Riot roundtable (and squaretable lol) about dynamic queue. Riot mentions starvation issues where players seeking a popular role would never get a game. Here's the clip if you're curious: https://youtu.be/xwPa1SGLGv0?t=20m6s

Well my brain immediately went to how smart people have solved this same problem for traffic jams. They use a concept called congestion pricing. The TL DR; is that when traffic is high on a road, it costs more to use that road, and when traffic is low on a road, it costs less to use it. Here's a very basic primer on the concept: http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/congestionpricing/sec2.htm OR http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop08039/cp_prim1_08.htm OR http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+congestion+pricing%3F

So how could Riot implement a traffic system to lower queue times? Penalize players for selecting high demand roles. Make games worth less IP, or have lower key drops (they already have longer queue times). On the flip side, if a player selects a low demand role, make the rewards larger. More IP, 2x key drop rate, etc. This would push the player base towards selecting into a less popular role.

To do this, Riot would also need to make the role demands public. So if there are 1000 mid players queueing up, and only 10 supports, Riot would need to display this knowledge so the player base would know that a support is needed (and then get the extra rewards for doing so).

My $0.02! I think it can work. Am I missing anything? Thoughts?

14 Comments

NotSpecialDude6/15/2016, 3:26:33 PM2 votes

A good idea. I'm all for it.

[slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

Stalinium6/14/2016, 5:46:02 PM1 votes

I would like to see more rewards for supports personally.

As it is now, I have 0 reasons to play support. In fact, I have multiple reasons NOT to:

  1. I suck. I'm at a terrible Elo, where everyone else sucks. And to be honest, if I don't win the game on my own, I usually lose. I simply cannot rely on other players to do what they need to. Supports don't usually carry the game...
  2. So boring...ugh. I'm sure that it's fun if you're actually good, but ugggghhhh. I can think of far better ways to spend 40ish minutes of my life, beginning with impaling myself with my keyboard.
  3. The rewards. Less IP than someone who carried, but I put in just as much effort and time. Less satisfaction. I can't do anything awesome as a support. I just derp around, CC sometimes, and peel for my ADC. Roam mid for an assist. Game turns into Aram at 30:00, I can't do anything

As a complete potato (have not even made it to Wood 5 yet, still somewhere around Wet Toilet Paper 4), it just is not fun. Not rewarding. And Que times being short? Ha! I can only bore myself faster. I'm totally down for increased support rewards.

Buttsubushi6/14/2016, 6:32:08 PM1 votes

Just for picking support? No.

Picking Fill? Yes.

Picking Fill + Wining game = Guaranteed Key Frag.

VernMcHanson6/14/2016, 6:48:33 PM1 votes

The problem would remain in ranked play. Certain roles, in certain metas, will always be more desirable because of the ability to carry low skilled teammates. Since the goal of ranked play is to improve your rank, its unlikely that IP, RP, or key fragments would be enough to encourage ranked fill.